


Unicorns And All

by FictionPenned



Category: Blade Runner (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-11
Updated: 2020-11-11
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:41:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27485944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FictionPenned/pseuds/FictionPenned
Summary: “But do you remember it?” Rachael presses, leaning forward. Her long brown hair skirts the top of her shoulders, curling slightly as it settles upon her collarbone.Rick fidgets in his chair. “No, I don’t. I’ve lived a lot of days, Rachael, and administered a lot of tests. Damned if I remember all of them.”“But if memories are important enough that a test for replicants hinges upon them, would you not try to hold onto as many of yours as you possibly can?”A guttural laugh rises from deep within his throat. “I don’t think the mind works like that, Rachael. The brain keeps what it keeps. You don’t judge replicants on what isn’t there, but what is.”Written for Fic In A Box 2020
Relationships: Rick Deckard/Rachael
Comments: 3
Kudos: 14
Collections: Fic In A Box





	Unicorns And All

**Author's Note:**

  * For [primeideal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/primeideal/gifts).



It is difficult to forge a life when one is acutely aware that many of their memories are manufactured. Rachael has repeatedly turned her childhood over in her mind, searching for inconsistencies — hunting for any hint that it was never real — but she finds nothing. It is as clear and perfect as her memories of shooting Leon, as her memories of standing beneath neon lights with rain falling into her eyes, as her memories of Rick Deckard’s hands roaming across her body. Were it not for the certainty with which Rick had recited her own memories back at her, she might not have believed that they were artificial.

Even now, she imagines that spider in her mind’s eye, thinks of the moment when it burst into hundreds upon hundreds of minuscule children. Logically, she knows that that memory belongs to someone else — Tyrell’s niece — but emotionally, it rings just as true as everything else that has been recorded in her mind and scribed deeply into the surface of her heart.

Indeed, she somehow wonders if she has a mind or a heart. Rick Deckard would not have believed that to be true, back in the days when he was a Blade Runner, assigned to kill her kind should they venture back onto Earth. Words like ‘retirement’ render the process almost clinical, as if the victims were mere machines, not complex systems capable of thought and breath and life.

For her part, Rachael _feels_ alive.

She cannot imagine how a human’s experiences might differ from her own. There is no manner of thinking conceivable beyond her own, not manner of feeling conceivable beyond her own, no manner of evolution conceivable beyond her own. To her, this existence that she is experience is almost indistinguishable from a human’s. Tyrell led her into believing that she was a human for a terribly long time, and she imagines that if it was truly any different, she would have sussed it out herself before Rick Deckard’s lengthy, one hundred question test took her by the hand and led her directly into the muddy waters of self-doubt.

The only real difference, it would seem, is in knowing that she has an expiration date.

If Rick is to be believed, her four years should have come and gone by now, yet she is still holding onto life. She feels no onset of weakness, no slowing of the mind, no steady descent into entropy. There is only the steadiness passage of time as it trudges onward into the future, and the dreadful knowledge that on some uncertain day, at some uncertain time, somewhere within the uncertain future, she will die.

Humans live out their own lives beneath the same looming threat.

Vague.

Ominous.

Omnipresent.

Perhaps she is even more like them than even she previously supposed. The lines between them are fuzzy and uncertain, marked entirely by presumption and assumption.

There have been many days when a desperate desire for self-discovery has seized her in its grasp and injected within her veins a strong desire for self-discovery. On those days, she has a habit of trapping Rick at their kitchen table and demanding that he share his memories of the many tests that the Tyrell company and Blade Runners used in order to decide which people where humans and which were replicants, the tests that were so accurate that not once, in his entire career, did Rick Deckard mistakenly “ _retire_ ” a human.

Many of these tests come in the form of questions.

The questions measure her manner of thinking, her relationship with others, the speed at which she reaches certain conclusions. The first time she sat for one of these tests, back when they first met, it took an enormous amount of time for him to reach an uncertain conclusion. He has since explained to her, on countless occasions, that she is a more advanced model than the tests are meant for, that he had left the service well before he learned the specific quirks of her make and model.

On some of these days, she turns the questions back on him.

At first, he was reticent to play along. Rick Deckard is not an open man. He is rarely willing to be vulnerable, and he often requires some convincing before he so much as considers going along with hair-brained idea that requires that manner of cooperation. In the process, she has learned just as much about him as she has learned about herself. She knows his earliest memory, his fondest memory, his most irrational fears. They are different from hers, but not entirely so. They have the same responses to many moral quandaries. They struggle with many of the same insecurities. They hold some of the same values.

Once, he admitted to her that some of the answers to the questions have changed since he first met her.

She has made him a better man, he said.

In return, she asked if that was something that he would expect from humans or from replicants.

He merely quirked his lips into a lopsided smirk and said, “Neither. I’m a stubborn guy. Stubborn guys are hard to move.”

Rachael has thought much about those words since they first hit her ears. She replays them over and over again in her mind, breaks them down, dissects the many possible layers of their meaning. She holds them tightly to her chest on the hard days when anger and grief and worry worm their way into their hearts and they squabble.

And she holds them tightly to her chest on the day when she musters up the nerve to ask him, “How do you know you are not a replicant?”

He looks at her with parted lips and undisguised disbelief, as if stunned by her boldness. “Surely somebody would have rooted me out, if I was. Replicants were not allowed on Earth for most of my life, you know that.”

Rachael slides into the chair beside him, lacing her fingers together and resting her hands on the surface of the table between them. “Would they bother to examine the team doing the retiring? It seems more efficient to have replicants fighting replicants, does it not?”

Rick’s fingers twitch, and a vein pops in the center of his forehead.

He is uncomfortable.

“They must have vetted us at some point. It would be stupid not to.”

“But do you remember it?” Rachael presses, leaning forward. Her long brown hair skirts the top of her shoulders, curling slightly as it settles upon her collarbone.

Rick fidgets in his chair. “No, I don’t. I’ve lived a lot of days, Rachael, and administered a lot of tests. Damned if I remember all of them.”

“But if memories are important enough that a test for replicants hinges upon them, would you not try to hold onto as many of yours as you possibly can?”

A guttural laugh rises from deep within his throat. “I don’t think the mind works like that, Rachael. The brain keeps what it keeps. You don’t judge replicants on what isn’t there, but what is.”

Rachael’s eyes focus upon the empty air directly in front of her face as she _thinks_. There is no path through this conversation that does not entail uncomfortably personal questions and highly revealing answers, but is that not what they agreed to when they committed their lives to each other? Is that natural curiosity not part of loving someone with your entire self? Is it not an important rabbit to chase if they are to continue to become better people?

“What is there for you, Rick?” Though the words are impertinent, her tone is gentle. “Is there anything that would be of interest to someone like you?” There’s a pause as he settles back in his chair, defensively crossing his arms over his chest. It is a primal gesture, meant to protect against an oncoming threat. It is useless here, where the only possible threats are words and introspective, rather than violence and physical blows.

“Does it matter?”

Rachael shrugs. “It matters to me, even if it doesn’t matter to you.” There’s a soft, fond smile at the corners of her lips, meant to make him feel more at ease, to remind him that she is his partner, not his enemy.

Rick’s cheeks puff in a great, heaving, tangled mass of a sigh. “You’ve always got to come in hot, don’t you?”

The smile lingers, deepening the dimples set into both her cheeks. “Would you like me half as much if I didn’t?”

Another laugh spins from Rick’s lips. “No.”

It takes some time for him to settle into the decision to speak. He draws a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his trousers, and perches a solitary one between his lips. It bounces slightly as he roots around for a suitable lighter, and he avoids making eye contact with her until he’s quite ready to set the end ablaze. A breath of smoke floods his lungs, setting his nerves at ease before he exhales it through his nose. The cloudlingers in the air for a moment before it is finally dispelled — surrendering beneath the steady whir of a beleaguered air conditioning unit.

Rachael leans back in her chair, primly crossing her ankles as she patiently awaits his answer.

She is well-aware that Rick Deckard often requires space to breathe. He lived much of his life alone in a crowd, connecting with no one outside of the occasional personal conversation with a coworker. He is not accustomed to company, unaccustomed to the quiet thrill that comes with the exchange of personally revealing questions and answers. It is intimate, exciting, alluring. Rachael thrives upon it, and she does not doubt that someday, he will, too.

He just needs to let go of some of his fear, lower some of those walls.

There is another puff of smoke, followed by a sigh so heavy that it crashes through both the table and the floorboards beneath. “Don’t laugh, and don’t tell anyone else. Ever. No matter what kind of weapon they pull on you.”

Rachael’s smile fades slightly, collapsing in on itself as the tone becomes increasingly serious. “I would never do such a thing. You know that.”

This time, the smoke turns a ring. It hovers for a long moment, floating between them like an all-seeing, all-knowing eye. An unnamed god surveying the conversation. Willing to make himself known, but never to speak.

“There is a flash, sometimes. Of a unicorn in a forest.”

Rachael’s delicately sculpted eyebrows lift in surprise. She did not know what secrets she expected from Deckard, but she had never once considered that he might speak of mythical creatures in impossible places, unseen by anyone alive or dead. It does not ascribe to the laws of the universe, only the laws of the imagination.

“Did you dream it?”

Deckard shakes his head. “Too clear. Too certain. I don’t know how to describe it, but it feels different than a dream. It’s a memory, but it can’t be my memory.”

The end of the cigarette brightens with a breath, before once again fading away into a dull, crimson ember.

Rachael breathes, trying to find the words with the most meaning, the best meaning. “Not a spider?”

Rick chuckles, a dark, doubting sound. “A damn sight worse than a spider, I’d say. If anyone on your side of the table during an interrogation would have spun tales of unicorns and forests, I would have clocked them as a replicant immediately. Either that, or crazy, but I’m not crazy, and I’ve never heard of a replicant going on about horned ponies with glittering white coats.”

Though he has not yet burned the cigarette down to the bitter end, he snuffs out the flame on the worn and beveled edge of the kitchen table. Its burn joins dozens of similar marks, notating the slow passage of time in this place, indicating that it had once been inhabited by a couple named Rachael and Rick, people who were far too fond of having difficult conversations and far too unlucky to locate a decent ashtray when they go out scavenging for things they need.

Rachael tilts her head. Her eyes search out Rick’s through the smokey gloom, searching for the unspoken truths of his thoughts and emotions. “Would someone do that? Implant a fantasy within a replicant?”

Deckard shrugs and places his hands behind his head, palms cradling the back of his skull as he leans back even further in his chair. The wood groans beneath the strain of his shifting weight, but he pays it no mind. “Don’t see why they wouldn’t. People tend to have a bit of a laugh when they’re on the job. Or maybe it was part of an experiment, like you. Some sort of proposed evolution for the species or something. If I was a scientist, I could probably tell you more, but I wasn’t exactly paid for my brains.”

“What purpose would it serve? Putting a unicorn in someone’s mind? It doesn’t offer any insight into identity or history. It doesn’t fool you into thinking that you might be human. If anything, it does the opposite. Would there be a point in that?”

“You tell me.”

Rachael stands and crosses the room, pouring herself a drink from a half-finished bottle of whiskey. Courtesy dictates that she ought to pour Rick one as well, but this does not seem like the moment for courtesy. It is a moment for selfishness, for dissection, for discovery. She downs it in a single gulp before pouring herself another and crossing the several steps back towards the table. She sinks into the chair with the grace that she retains from her previous position in the Tyrell Corporation. She may no longer be able to afford fine furs and fancy clothes, but she continues to carry herself as though she does. It seeps into every fiber of her being, every cell of her body, every electric pulse through her nervous system.

She gives the question a great deal of thought before she begins to lend her voice towards a satisfactory answer. “I think,” she says slowly, tasting every sound of the letters as they leave her tongue, “That one would impact such a thing only if they were interested in seeing whether or not a replicant was capable of latching onto an anomaly and unraveling the mystery of its own making. They would want you to obsessively fixate upon the unicorn, to slowly descend into a crisis regarding the truth of your own nature. They would keep you close so that they could watch you, and ensure that you found a job where you would both be reasonably protected from suspicion and be given all the information that you needed in order to reach your own conclusions.”

Rachael swings her feet onto the seat of an empty chair, fighting to keep pride from tainting her expression. “So what do you think?” she continues, idly circling her hand in the air beside her head as if collecting thoughts or gathering the energy to engage in a dramatic bow. In this moment, she would be tempted by both actions. “Am I close?”

Rick surrenders to the itch of addiction and impulse, reaching back into his pockets and extracting a fresh cigarette. He’ll circle back around for the unfinished one later — nothing is allowed to go to waste in their little household — but this moment demands fresh thoughts and fresh eyes and fresh smoke. “Seems about right, presuming, of course, that someone with a unicorn is a replicant and doesn’t just have a loose screw rattling about in their skull. Personally, I still like the look of the latter.”

“Of course you would. You wouldn’t have to change your thinking if it was a matter of chance rather than engineering.”

“I’ve changed my thinking already, no thanks to you, but you knew that already. I’m surprised you don’t hold it over my head like an anvil. ‘ _Hey, Rick, remember that time…_ ’” he lapses into a rather poor impression of her, but it fades away on the tinny, canned breeze from the struggling air conditioning unit. It seems in bad taste to mock somebody whom he allows to hold such power over him. Rachael knows him better than anyone else on this planet, and she is the first person with whom he has shared the unicorn that haunts him as doggedly as a specter.

He shakes a thought loose, straightening his spine, throwing back his shoulders, and lifting his chin as he pulls himself out of the emotional moment and back onto solid ground. “Is that all you wanted? To know if there was anything that might make me a little more like you? Are we done?”

A slow breath vacates Rachael’s lungs — full to the brim with quiet contemplation. “I should think that it would be a good thing to know yourself and to trust the people you love enough to allow them to know you, too.”

“Do you think I’m a replicant?” The question is riddled with the insecurity that has long hidden beneath the layered veils of policy and procedure and feigned bravado.

“Does it matter what I think?”

Rick swallows, the effort visible as it bumps against the tight muscles and tendons that line his throat. “Does it change what lies between us? Does it change what you think of me?”

Rachael finishes her drink with care, taking her time. When she places the drink back on the table, an oily lipstick stain marks the edge of the glass, marking the traces of her presence and the path of her movements in much the same way that memories speak to the past. It would be easy, she thinks, to replicate the stain with an artist’s brush, to replicate the print of other lips, to paint the picture that she had been there when, in fact, she never was. It is much like building a false memory. There has to be a goal in mind, there has to be perspective, and in the end, the two things must fuse together to forge a single driving purpose.

“You are still Rick Deckard, and I am still Rachael. The world has not fallen into anymore pieces than it already was.”

“I once heard a person say that true happiness cannot be achieved without a strong sense of self. Never quite bought into that philosophy myself, and I still don’t.”

Rachael props her elbow on the table and leans forward. Restless fingers tap against the line of her jaw, marking the rhythm of her thoughts and the steady pace of her heartbeat as they both trudge forward into the intangible, unknowable future, forever interlinked. “What do you think is required for happiness, then?”

“A long night, a beautiful woman, and a strong drink.” It is a flippant answer, meant to disguise the truth of his thoughts and the heart of his feelings, to push her further away from him and guard against all possible damages.

Rachael merely stares him down, awaiting a better answer.

It is akin to pulling teeth, but eventually, it comes. “Happiness is a matter of luck and opportunity. If you do the best you can with what you’ve been given, then maybe, in the end, you’ll find a bit of true happiness, and that will be enough.”

A tiny, sad smile situates itself upon Rachael’s lips. It is not a happy smile, nor a humorous one. Rather, it is born from a complicated mess of emotions. “Finding both luck and opportunity in a world like ours is about as hard as finding your unicorn. We are incredibly lucky that we have been given more than four years in which to try to find it.”

There is a spark in Rick Deckard’s eyes, a hint of amusement in the lines around his eyes, a characteristic loll of his head as he regards her in a new light. “Like a unicorn, “ he echoes.

“I’d say we’re off to a decent start, insofar as luck and opportunity are concerned,” Rachael says.

When Rick inclines his chin and raises an eyebrow, beckoning her to divulge her logic, she continues, “Well, we were lucky enough to find each other. Opportunistic enough to save each other’s lives. Opportunistic enough that we were able to run away together. Lucky to be free from either expiration dates or sudden calls for our retirement. I’d chalk that up as being fairly luck and opportunistic. Many people have certainly had it worse than we have.”

“Plenty of people have also had it better,” Rick observes.

Rachael is quick to fire back at him, enigmatic smile still lingering upon her face. Debate is familiar territory, for her. At the Tyrell Corporation, she was often engaged in difficult conversations, often thrust into discussions that lay far beyond both her comfort zone and the limited scope of her expertise. In retrospect, that was part of testing the limits of her abilities, how well she could perform, how thoroughly she could blend in, how useful she might be. At the time, she just assumed that that sort of trial for par for the course in jobs as prestigious and strenuous as hers had been. “That is true, but we cannot change the fortunes of other people. Only our own.”

“But if our memories have been written,if we have been created, then so, too, have our fortunes been determined for us.”

Rachael rises onto her feet and laying her palms flat upon the table and using her full height to close the space between them. Her toes keep firm contact with the floor even as her heels leave it, giving her a few extra inches. Deckard smells of cigarettes, but his breath is warm and familiar, like stepping from out of darkness and back into the light. She is tempted to kiss him, tempted to write her love across his lips and remind her that no matter who he is or where he comes from, she will remain by his side until the very end.

The tension between them is precarious.

One of them need only shift an inch, only breathe, only surrender to a flutter of temptation to send it shattering onto the floor below.

Mutual attraction is a dangerous thing, constantly perched upon the delicate, razor-sharp edge of a blade.

There is a certain challenge in refusing to be the person who surrenders to it.

“We can change those fortunes,” she murmurs, her lips incredibly close to his own. “We already have, in our own way.”

“We ran.” Trust Rick to always strike for the obvious. He is not the man to go to for intrigue or subtlety, but she does not expect that of him. It is not in his nature, or the many years of training that define his line of work. Subtlety is more in line with her own domain, and it is part of the reason why they complement each other so well as a couple.

Rachael tilts her head slightly, regarding his face with an untoward degree of interest. “We dared to love.”

“We rebelled.”

A gentle beat of laughter passes from one mouth to another in a gesture as intimate as a kiss and twice as lively. “We did that, too.”

She trails her hand over his chest, his neck, his jaw, aware of every muscled inch of him. “And if given the chance, I would do it again. Unicorn and all.”

It is Rick Deckard that gives into temptation and desire, Rick Deckard who reduces that space into dangerous nothingness, Rick Deckard who who takes the world and turns it on its end.

She falls into him with a quiet exhale and fervent desire.

When they part, he raises a single eyebrow in a mischievous arc. “Unicorns and all, huh?”

Rachael leans in close and kisses him again.

Deep.

Adoring.

Accepting.

“Unicorns and all.”


End file.
